Enabling Programmable Self with HealthVault

Working with Health Data

Data is a powerful tool to understand behaviors and trigger appropriate, measured change. Users can find out interesting trends by running calculations on their data stored in HealthVault, as I’ll show throughout this book.

For instance, through the health information section, a user can chart his weight readings (Figure 1-10).

Figure 1-10. Tracking weight in HealthVault

You will see that over the last several readings, weight has been stable around 257 pounds. Nonetheless, I would like to take this a bit further and analyze these readings. To do this, I click on the Export button in the health information section. This gives me the readings in a comma-separated values (CSV) format, which I can then open in Microsoft Excel or any spreadsheet program (Figure 1-11). If you don’t have weight data, I encourage you to download the sample spreadsheet with weight data included as part of this book’s examples and follow along with that data.

Figure 1-11. Weight readings in Microsoft Excel

Using Excel, I can clean the data so I can chart and analyze it further. I can add a series date attribute by just using the date from the first column (Figure 1-12).

Figure 1-12. Using Excel ...